The Alans

The Latin Alani, in the language from the first century, when Lucan could already use the name for the warlike riders beyond the Caucasus, and given its full portrait by Ammianus in the same excursus that introduced the Huns: tall, fair, terrifyingly mobile, worshippers of a sword fixed in the earth, a people holding the immense steppe from the Danube toward the Ganges in the geographer’s exaggeration, and, he notes, in almost all things like the Huns but gentler in life and manners. After 406 the name enters the annals of the West’s dismemberment, Alans crossing the frozen Rhine with Vandals and Sueves, settling in Gaul and Iberia, riding to Carthage under a king whose Vandal successors kept rex Wandalorum et Alanorum in their royal style for a century.

The entry’s distinction on this page is that Latin alone records the name at both ends of its career, as the far rumor of Nero’s generals and as a licensed people inside the falling empire’s own provinces. No other steppe nation of this atlas got so deep into the Roman world while keeping its name: Gaulish place-names and the medieval fashion for the personal name Alain have both been traced, plausibly if not provably, to the settlements of the fifth century. The Sarmatians gave Rome a frontier; the Alans, in the end, gave it inhabitants.

The Greek Alanoí, first substantially attested in Josephus, who describes the great raid of the 70s CE through the Caspian Gates into Media and Armenia, kings fleeing before nomads who roped their prey from horseback with lassos. The name then enters the working vocabulary of empire: Ptolemy maps the Alanoí among the peoples of Sarmatia, and Arrian, governing Cappadocia for Hadrian, wrote the Order of Battle against the Alans, the one surviving Roman staff document composed against a named steppe enemy, when the raiders came south again in 135. Byzantine writers carried the name on for the Caucasian kingdom, but its classical attestations belong to these first alarmed and precise centuries.

Greek gives the family its earliest firm dates, and something rarer, the name embedded in the paperwork of response: not ethnography at leisure but a raid remembered by a survivor-historian and a battle plan drafted by a sitting governor. Between Josephus’s lassos and Arrian’s deployment orders, the Alanoí enter literature already as a military problem stated with professional respect. On a page where most names begin as rumors at the world’s edge, this one begins as an operational term, which is its own kind of tribute from one cavalry tradition to another.

Ālánliáo 阿蘭聊 appears in the Hou Hanshu’s chapter on the western regions in a single administrative sentence of enormous historical value: the state of Yǎncài, it reports, has changed its name to Ālánliáo. The transcription’s first two syllables carry the name Alan, and the notice is the Chinese registry’s record of the same transformation the western sources show from their side, the old Aorsi confederation of the Caspian steppe reorganizing, in the first centuries CE, under the Alanic name. The earlier form, Yǎncài, is treated on the Sarmatians’ page, and the pair of entries records the rename across the two pages exactly as the Han clerks recorded it across two dynastic histories. Chinese IPA is omitted per this atlas’s policy for reconstructed ancient readings.

The entry is the atlas’s cleanest specimen of a name-change captured in a foreign archive in real time. Greek and Latin writers watched Sarmatians shade into Alans gradually and never marked the moment; the Chinese bureaucratic habit of registering states by current name forced the transition into a dated sentence. That the westernmost people of the Han world-registry can be checked against the easternmost people of Ptolemy’s, and that the two accounts agree, is one of the quiet triumphs of ancient record-keeping, two empires bracketing the steppe and, without knowing it, keeping each other’s books.

The Classical Armenian Alankʿ, the name of the neighbors beyond the Caucasus crest, wearing the same plural -kʿ as the Honkʿ and Hepʿtʿałkʿ of this atlas’s other steppe pages. Its richest early setting is Movsēs Xorenacʿi’s tale of the war between king Artašēs and the Alans: the Alan princess Satʿenik, seeing her captive brother from the rampart, bargains across the river, and Artašēs, advised that heroes take their brides by force, rides across, throws a red-leather lasso across the princess’s waist, and carries her home to be queen of Armenia, in lines Movsēs quotes from the songs the storytellers still sang.

The entry is the family’s one name embedded in kinship rather than fear or administration. Rome drafted battle plans against Alans and Constantinople hired them; Armenia, which fought them too, also married them, and put an Alan queen into its national legend, her lasso-capture a courtly mirror of the lassos Josephus’s raiders threw in earnest. That the wooing weapon of the legend is the signature weapon of the steppe is the detail that gives the story its truth: the neighbors knew each other’s hands. Among the records of the Alans, only the Armenian one remembers them as in-laws.

The Arabic al-Lān, the geographers’ name for the Alans of the Caucasus and their kingdom, the initial vowel of the old name absorbed into the article so neatly that the word looks native. The form belongs to the literature of the mountain frontier: al-Masʿūdī describes the king of al-Lān, his armored cavalry, his alliance-by-marriage with the neighboring Sarīr, and the fortress guarding the pass the Arabs called Bāb al-Lān, the Gate of the Alans, the Darial that a millennium earlier had admitted the raid Josephus recorded. For the Muslim geographers the Alans were no longer steppe wanderers but a settled Christian mountain kingdom, one of the fixed peoples of the Caucasus chapter.

The entry shows the family’s name at its most domesticated, and its referent at the same stage: raiders in the Greek and Latin entries, in the Arabic they are a monarchy with a foreign policy, taken seriously as a counterweight to the Khazars whose page this atlas now holds. The pass-name is the durable part. Bāb al-Lān and its Persian predecessor Dar-i Alān outlived the kingdom, and the Darial Gorge on today’s Georgian-Russian border still carries the Alans’ name through it, a people become a doorway, which for the guardians of the Caucasus roads is perhaps the most honest memorial.